2007/10/25, Bryan Tong Minh
<bryan.tongminh(a)gmail.com>om>:
*
Changing the licensing on the derivative work to be compatible with
the original work, and inform the creator of the new work of the
change and the reason why.
You can't legally do that. If you release a
derivative work of a GFDL
work under something different than the GFDL, you violate the terms of
the license and your license terminates. So you commit copyright
infringement. It does nto mean that your derivative automatically
becomes GFDL. IANAL.
Actually, in this case I think we can - by stating it's public domain,
the creator of the derived image is reneging on their copyright on the
work. It is perfectly allowed to publish a public domain work under
the GFDL (although it is not effective, because being in the public
domain, people can copy it anyway). It would be different if they had
put another license on it, but if they put it under PD or
copyrightedfreeuse, I think putting it back under the GFDL would be
unproblematic.
Putting it back under GFDL is not the issue. Releasing GFDL content as
public domain is.
The GPL (and the GFDL) werde designed to prevent incorporation into
proprietary software (or texts). Putting GFDLd data into PD would
allow for that.
I think there is one exception: If the new work is large enough,
compared to the GFDLd part, the work can be released under any license
(or as PD) as long as the GFDL parts are marked as such (and the
license included, authors named etc.)
I doubt that's the case here, though.
Magnus